Chris Hedges's Blog, page 28

Corporate Media’s Sanders Denialism Is Only Getting Worse

The results from the New Hampshire primary are in—mercifully quickly—showing Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders victorious with 26% of the vote, ahead of former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg with 24%. However, it was third place Amy Klobuchar, with 20%, who seemed to draw the greatest media buzz. The Minnesota senator has received a lot of press attention of late—almost all of it positive.

Why Losing Is Actually Winning

CNN’s election panel (2/12/20) heaped praise upon her; former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe described her performance as “spectacular,” while Democratic strategist David Axelrod claimed she “has a great personal touch.” Vox’s Matthew Yglesias (2/11/20) called her “the thinking moderate Democrat’s electability candidate.” The Week (2/10/20) said she had “clearly touched a chord” with the electorate, and NPR (2/12/20) claimed her third place was a victory that “shocked the establishment.”

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The Christian Science Monitor (2/11/20) suggested her rise was a win for Midwestern values and pragmatism, portraying her as the “kinder,” “forgiving” and “empathetic” candidate. This might surprise some readers, as Klobuchar presents herself as a tough-on-crime former prosecutor, and is known for previously assaulting her staffers (Vanity Fair, 3/15/19).

Other outlets went even further. Bloomberg’s headline (2/10/20) insisted that “In New Hampshire, a Third-Place Finish Could Still Be a Win,” with the organization tweeting (2/12/20) that “Bernie Sanders may have come first in New Hampshire, but Amy Klobuchar won.” CBS Minnesota (2/12/20) also declared that the “third place finish for Sen. Klobuchar was a ‘win.’” MSNBC commentator Adrienne Elrod  (2/11/20) explained the thinking:

That key third-place finish…. Amy Klobuchar, the momentum is on her side, this would be a huge huge victory for Amy. In fact, I would almost argue that a third-place finish for Amy would be stronger and more important than a first-place finish for Bernie.

There you have it: Third is officially better than first.

The reason Klobuchar was “the story of the night,” NPR (2/12/20) helpfully admitted, was because “the search is on for the Sanders alternative.” “If Bernie Sanders looks like he’s running away with it, for the Democratic establishment that’s almost as scary as losing to Donald Trump,” said MSNBC Morning Joe host Willie Geist (2/3/20). Co-host Joe Scarborough explained that the Democrats could look to Mike Bloomberg as their “political savior”: “It may not be to get the 50%” of delegates, he said. “It may just be to stop Bernie and open the door for somebody else.”

Why Winning Is Actually Losing

This “stop Bernie at all costs” mentality explains why some of the media simply ignored Sanders’ victory altogether, part of a longstanding Bernie blackout strategy (FAIR.org, ). Reuters (2/12/20), for example, headlined its live primary coverage with the words “Pete Buttigieg Finishes Second in New Hampshire Primary, Amy Klobuchar Third.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Trip Gabriel (Twitter, 2/12/20) claimed that the two stories of the night were Klobuchar’s performance and Buttigieg gaining ground on Sanders, echoing the Onion take (2/12/20): “Bernie Sanders loses to Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg in key battle for second and third place.” Sometimes life imitates satire.

Another way to present a victory as a loss was to combine the vote totals of all the “moderate” candidates to show that “Sanders could lose the Democratic nomination to a unified centrist vote” (Business Insider, 2/12/20). This is based on the assumption that supporters of particular candidates see themselves as belonging to ideological camps that don’t cross over—a dubious premise.  For example, polling suggests that if Joe Biden were to drop out of the race, the biggest bloc of his supporters would switch to Sanders as their second choice.

Nevertheless, Vox (2/12/20) argued that the results “show Bernie Sanders still has an ‘electability’ problem,” claiming that exit polls showed that voters who prioritized beating Trump, rather than someone who they agree with on major issues, chose Buttigieg.  But this is a false dichotomy that ignores the fact that words like “electable” and “pragmatic” have been coded for decades to mean “right-wing” or “pro-corporate” (Extra!, 9/1/92, 7/1/06; FAIR.org, 1/1/95, 3/16/10, 8/21/19).

It also ignores the reality that Sanders does better in head-to-head polls against Trump than either Buttigieg or Klobuchar, who often lose to the president. If media analysts can’t seem to recognize this reality, voters increasingly do; in the latest Morning Consult poll (The Hill, 2/12/20), more voters (29%) named Sanders as the most likely to beat Trump than any other candidate.

The press has also continued the tradition (FAIR.org, 7/26/19) of forgetting how to do basic math when discussing Sanders. A slew of outlets, including Bloomberg (2/10/20), Forbes (2/12/20) and the New Yorker (2/12/20), presented Bernie’s New Hampshire win as a negative, noting he won 60% of the state in 2016 and far less this time around.

To grasp the absurdity of the comparison, let’s imagine you own an ice cream store. You sell only two flavors: vanilla and chocolate. Chocolate is the most popular, making up 60% of sales. You then start selling eight more flavors, making ten. Chocolate is still the most popular: 26% of customers choose it. Would anyone in their right mind think, “What the hell is the problem with chocolate? No one is buying it any more!” Would any functioning adult, let alone ice cream business specialists, be unable to grasp why you’re selling fewer bowls of chocolate than previously? Yet political journalists across the board have apparently failed to understand that 2016 was effectively a two-horse race between Sanders and Hillary Clinton, whereas at least ten major candidates stood this time. And the fact that some people picked strawberry or pistachio does not necessarily equal a rejection of chocolate.

Of course, the actual reason journalists perform mental gymnastics worthy of an Olympic gold medal is that they are parts of large international corporations owned by the extremely wealthy, and funded (through advertising) by other extremely large corporations. Someone like Sanders, who promises to take on the power and influence of the rich, is an unwelcome intrusion into politics as usual. That’s one reason why we are deluged with stories about how Medicare for All is a really bad idea (FAIR.org, 4/29/19) or that billionaires don’t like socialism (FAIR.org, 2/3/20).

Sanders is the frontrunner going into the next Democratic debate on Wednesday. But don’t expect the media to treat him particularly well. Chuck Todd, who this week referred his supporters as the “digital brownshirt brigade”—referring to the Nazi paramilitaries who rounded up and executed people like Sanders’ family—is moderating it.

Elites Turn to Bloomberg and Remove Their Masks

Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and Democratic presidential candidate, is having a moment. After polling at only a few single digits last year, he is now emerging as a top-tier candidate, pushing past former Vice President Joe Biden to claim a spot far closer to the top of the polls. One could attribute this rise to the insane amount of cash he has spent on his campaign — more than $200 million so far — out of his own bottomless pockets to blast commercials on every platform as he sells himself to the public. Now, liberal pundits are contemplating things like, “It is time to earnestly consider the possibility that Bloomberg will be the Democratic nominee for president.” But are we honestly considering him a serious candidate?

Bloomberg’s main stint with politics was as mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, during which time he pushed aggressively to criminalize and racially profile people of color under the guise of the “stop and frisk” policing model. The idea was simple: Preemptively arrest poor Black and Latino men, and crime rates would magically drop. Thousands of men were ruined in Bloomberg’s dragnet, and the policy persisted until legal challenges forced the city to end the program with a judge declaring it unconstitutional. In launching his bid for the White House last year, Bloomberg stood in front of black congregants at a church and said, “I want you to know that I realize back then I was wrong.”

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Perhaps the billionaire candidate simply expected that his money would wash the stench of racism away. But then, this week, the audio of a speech he gave just five years ago at the Aspen Institute defending “stop-and-frisk” became public. The recording, posted by independent journalist Benjamin Dixon, reveals Bloomberg saying:

Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city. And that’s where the real crime is. … You want to spend the money, put a lot of cops in the streets. Put the cops where the crime is, which means minority neighborhoods. And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them.

Bloomberg likely knew soon after he said this that his comments were unconscionable — he asked the Aspen Institute not to distribute the video footage of his speech. The words are on par with the type of racism President Donald Trump has spewed and shows a shocking disdain for the Constitution on par with that of a radical right-wing extremist (after all, Bloomberg won his self-funded race for mayor of New York City as a Republican). As part of the damage control over the devastating audio clip, Bloomberg said in a statement, “I inherited the police practice of stop-and-frisk, and as part of our effort to stop gun violence it was overused. By the time I left office, I cut it back by 95%, but I should’ve done it faster and sooner.” But Bloomberg left his mayoral office in 2013. Two years later, he was still defending his racist policy in public. The Intercept’s Lee Fang delved into the actual numbers and found that, far from cutting back the program by 95%, Bloomberg actually increased arrests by seven times during his tenure. Bloomberg has been caught in a lie. Aren’t we done electing liars?

Perhaps Bloomberg hopes white liberals can set aside any misgivings about his racism simply because they are fantasizing about the unlimited access to his campaign cash to defeat Trump. Bloomberg is currently the ninth richest person on the entire planet. In a sincere sounding op-ed in the New York Times, he explained how “the rewards of the economy are far too concentrated at the top,” and that he is “making the system fairer and more progressive, including by increasing taxes on wealthy people like me.” But only three years ago, Bloomberg — in a conversation with the then-head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine La Garde — explained that he was in favor of regressive taxation because it helped socially engineer poor people’s habits:

Taxes are regressive, yes they are. That’s the good thing about them because the problem is in people that don’t have a lot of money and so higher taxes should have a bigger impact on their behavior and how they deal with themselves. So I listen to people saying, ‘Oh we don’t want to tax the poor.’ Well, we want the poor to live longer so that they can get an education and enjoy life. And that’s why you do want to do exactly what a lot of people say you don’t want to do…. If you raise taxes on full sugary drinks, for example, they will drink less and there’s no question that full sugared drinks are one of the major factors in obesity and obesity is one of the major factors to heart disease.

While this clip has not received as much attention as Bloomberg’s defense of “stop-and-frisk,” it is just as instructive about his attitude toward low-income people. A multibillionaire’s opinion of those on the bottom rung of society is — unsurprisingly — utterly distorted by his obscene wealth.

How exactly can a racist, classist billionaire be favored by Democrats? As Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders continues to build momentum, the liberal establishment is in full panic mode. All of the superficial criticism they have cast at Sanders — that he’s an old white man who has been a Democrat for barely a minute — apply just as equally to Bloomberg. But what is most critically important to Bloomberg’s backers is that his politics are the polar opposite of Sanders. Just days after the disastrous Iowa caucuses, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson bizarrely declared Bloomberg “the biggest winner,” even though he skipped the caucuses. Robinson’s reasoning was that “the chaos in the Democratic Party and Trump’s White House are making Bloomberg’s argument for him.”

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman this week opined that Bloomberg “has the best chance to carry the day” in a match-up against Trump and that he is “a moderate progressive with a heart of gold but the toughness of a rattlesnake.” The words “moderate progressive” are code for “not a Democratic Socialist like Bernie Sanders.” Defenders of the establishment are terrified that in a bid to sweep away Trump and his policies, too many Americans will want to strip wealthy liberals of their power and money as well.

For all the fears that Democrats have about a Sanders’ nomination, the worst that Trump could accuse Sanders of doing is sticking to a set of economic, racial and gender justice principles for 40 years. He could harp on Sanders’ avowed socialism, but polls show Americans are actually quite receptive to socialism. He could lie and call Sanders a communist, but the Senator could retort, as he has already done, “Obviously I am not a communist,” even if Trump “maybe doesn’t know the difference.”

In demonizing Sanders and all he represents, Trump is siding with the likes of former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who is so terrified of Sanders he worried the senator would “ruin the economy” as president. By that comment, Blankfein of course means that Sanders plans to upend an economy that is working very well for him and terribly for the rest of us. Trump, Wall Street executives and wealthy elites like Blankfein and Bloomberg are all arrayed against threats to the corporate stranglehold on America. They are all part of the same team, and yet establishment Democrats claim there is a difference between Trump and Bloomberg.

As Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren dip in the polls, Bloomberg’s numbers are rising. In a head-to-head matchup with Trump, one poll showed him beating the president by the widest margin of all Democratic candidates. But Bloomberg has so far benefitted from scant media coverage and as journalists dig deeper, his many skeletons are tumbling out of the closet. He has also not yet faced his challengers on a debate stage. If he does cinch the nomination, picture Trump ripping him apart over his comments about crime in minority neighborhoods and his patronizing attitudes toward poor people.

Sanders surrogate Nina Turner, in a recent interview on MSNBC, dared to call Bloomberg an “oligarch” and raised the ire of liberal pundits. But the word “oligarch” is defined as a member of a nation’s economic elite unfairly using their status and money to wield power. Former Labor secretary and popular progressive author Robert Reich explained that, yes, at this stage, anyone is better than Trump and that “[o]ligarchy is better than tyranny.” But, he added, “neither is as good as democracy.”

Bloomberg’s immense wealth allows him to bypass the traditional reins of accountability that the public has over a candidate running for election. Bloomberg doesn’t need the public to donate to his campaign, and therefore there is no guarantee that as president he would care about serving the public. Already with Trump in the White House, we are suffering the ill effects of an unaccountable wealthy person who cares more about his money than his country. How can anyone who wants to defeat Trump want to replace him with someone not unlike him?

Is Trump the Worst of the Worst?

I’ve been as focused on the Trump impeachment and presidential primary dramas as any other American political commentator in recent months and weeks. At the same time, I’ve been keeping notes on developments overshadowed by the non-defenestration of Donald Trump and the candidate contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. The Trump-led march to apocalypse has been continuing apace beneath the bigger headlines, my journal suggests.

Most reasonably attentive U.S. citizens know that Australia was struck in January by epic and lethal wildfires that followed extreme drought there. Far fewer Americans know the drought and fires were the consequences of anthropogenic (capitalogenic, really) global warming driven by the excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Fewer still know that Australia is a leading climate change culprit thanks to its large-scale mining and export of coal and that its Prime Minister Scott Morrison has stood with Trump and Brazil’s eco-fascist President Jair Bolosonaro as a leading global climate-denier.

Even mildly observant American news consumers know Trump murdered a top Iranian military commander in a targeted assassination drone attack in Iraq last month — an action that brought the U.S. to the brink of a major war in the Middle East. Few Americans know this reckless and provocative attack crossed a new (anti-)“constitutional Rubicon.”  The open U.S. execution of a governmental military leader atop a foreign state with which the U.S. was not formally at war was an unprecedented U.S. violation of national and international law. That the murder took place without the permission of Iraq’s government made Trump’s transgression more audaciously criminal.

Most Americans are certainly aware a deadly coronavirus broke out in China and has spread around the world, including to the U.S. Far fewer Americans know the Trump White House’s war on “the administrative state” (really on those parts of the federal government that don’t serve concentrated wealth and power or that punish the working and lower classes) has rolled back the federal government’s ability to respond effectively to pandemics.

Trump has slashed funding for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its infectious disease research. For 2020, he proposes cutting the CDC budget by $1.3 billion, 20% below the previous year’s level, raising serious concerns among public health experts about the nation’s capacity to protect the citizenry against a deadly contagion.

“Cutting the CDC in the middle of a pandemic,” writes Esquire’s Charles Pierce, “is not viable in a functioning republic. We do not currently have one.”

Government-imposed poverty could also finish you off. Also lost in the news fog of impeachment and presidential primaries were two cruel White House assaults on the poor. In December, Trump issued an executive order that will remove 700,000 deeply impoverished American adults from SNAP (food stamp) benefits. Charities and churches are gearing up to try to meet a fraction of the need this vicious policy will produce among “surplus” Americans who have been deemed disposable by the administration.

Two weeks ago, the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court (on which two Trump appointees confirmed by the right-wing U.S. Senate have swung the balance of judicial power to the far-starboard side) ruled the Department of Homeland Security can implement Trump’s nativist, Stephen Miller-drafted “public charge rule.”  This malicious policy lets U.S. immigration officials deny green cards, visas and/or admission to the U.S. on the grounds that current or prospective immigrants might be “likely” to use government benefits, including food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Section 8 housing assistance, federal housing vouchers and Supplemental Security Income. The rule makes past or imagined future receipt of public benefits (including state and local cash assistance) a barrier to legal status. It lets immigration officers consider low English proficiency, low income, bad credit scores, medical problems and lack of private health insurance as reasons to deny immigrants green cards and visas.

This spiteful “wealth test” will affect an estimated 4 million immigrants a year. According to the American Friends Service Committee,

This change will force immigrant families to choose between their health and well-being and lawful immigration status: an impossible choice that harms everybody.  If they access benefits, they may leave their family vulnerable to separation. Or they may forgo needed assistance.

Another underappreciated story takes us back to climate and the southern reaches of the planet.  It was recently reported to little fanfare that West Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier has been melting at a dramatically rising rate thanks to warming ocean undercurrents. The cause of this ominous erosion, which could raise global sea levels by 10 feet, is the kind of capitalist-led climate change the Very Stable Genius tells the world not to be “alarmist” about even as he shreds environmental regulations, forbids federal employees from mentioning climate change and otherwise acts to accelerate the transformation of the entire planet into a giant greenhouse gas chamber.

Trump’s 2021 fiscal-year budget proposal slashes funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by more than 25%. This is hardly surprising. Trump has issued executive orders undoing regulations that protect children from mercury poisoning and try to preserve the nation’s water supplies and public lands.

Along the way, Noam Chomsky notes in a recent interview, Trump continues “to dismantle the last vestiges of the arms control regime that has provided some limited degree of security from terminal nuclear war.” Even worse, perhaps, Trump has recently furthered prospects for such war by deploying a highly provocative new, “low-yield tactical’” nuclear weapon (the W76-2, requested, designed and produced under the Trump administration) aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine.

Not content merely to smite the poor, immigrants, his political enemies, constitutional checks and balances and the rule of law at home and abroad, the president seems dedicated to bringing forth the collapse of a decent and organized human existence — and indeed the downfall of life on Earth. It’s no wonder Chomsky calls Trump “the most dangerous criminal in human history.”

Hitler’s goal, Chomsky notes, “was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘deviants,’ along with tens of millions of Slav ‘Untermenschen.’ But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future [along with millions of other species].”

A socially and environmentally concerned Christian I know half-jokingly muses if “the president of the United States is the Antichrist.”

Sadly, the corporate-imperial Democrats seem to have been determined to indirectly reelect “the most dangerous criminal in human history” by handing him the long diversionary gifts of RussiaGate and UkraineGate and working furiously to prevent the presidential nomination of Bernie Sanders — the presidential candidate most ready, willing and able to mobilize enough lower-, working-, and middle-class voters to defeat Trump (forcing him to act on his clear threats to defy an electoral count that doesn’t go his way) in November.

None of Trump’s worst crimes were included in the Democratic-led House of Representatives’ case against “the most dangerous criminal in human history.” As with the Richard Nixon impeachment hearings, the charges centered not on the president’s most terrible transgressions bur rather “on his illegal acts to harm Democrats,” as Chomsky puts it.

The Democrats never had a chance of removing Trump through impeachment, thanks to Republican control of the Senate.

My nomination for either the stupidest or the most cynical thing said by a U.S. senator so far this year is Susan Collins’ statement that Trump will change his authoritarian ways since impeachment by the House taught him “a pretty big lesson.” The truth is quite the opposite. Trump learned yet again as throughout his long criminal career that he can get away with yet more nasty shit. As the Trump presidency’s incisive chronicler Michael Wolff observes in his latest book, “Siege: Trump Under Fire”:

One of the many odd aspects of Trump’s presidency was that he did not see being president, either the responsibilities or the exposure, as being all that different from his pre-presidential life. He had endured almost countless investigations in his long career. He had been involved in various kinds of litigation for the better part of forty-five years. He was a fighter who, with brazenness and aggression, got out of fixes that would have ruined a weaker, less wily player. That was his essential business strategy: what doesn’t kill me strengthens me. Though he was wounded again and again, he never bled out.

Trump’s longstanding modus operandi has been validated again: he can tough it out and emerge more powerful than before.

Hence the “shocking” aftermath of Trump’s Senate “exoneration”: the cold but unsurprising firings of impeachment witnesses Gordon Sondland and Alexander Vindman along with Vindman’s twin brother (authoritarian rulers like to punish whole families); the announcement that 70 “Obama holdovers” were or will be dismissed from the National Security Council, and the “rule-of-law” meltdown involving Trump and his attorney general’s norm-smashing intervention to veto federal prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations in the case of convicted Trump thug Roger Stone.

Pardons loom for Stone and other top Trump crime associates not named Michael Cohen. Is the president planning purge trials for after the election?

Faced with this openly authoritarian, barefacedly transgressive “beyond the rule-of-law” behavior, liberal cable-news types can do little more than shake their heads and tell viewers that ordinary Americans “only have one recourse left:” our holy, once-every-1,460-days chance to spend two minutes in a major party voting booth. In “liberal”-bourgeois media outlets, it isn’t just about keeping the ballot box sanitized against Sanders “socialism” (New Deal social progressivism). It’s also about keeping the people from protesting out in the streets, which millions of them really ought and need to be doing when the world’s most powerful office is held by “the most dangerous criminal in human history” — and when the normal bourgeois-constitutional and electoral mechanisms for containing and removing that criminal are being revealed as dangerously inadequate.

Chomsky’s above-quoted interview on Donald “Worse Than Hitler” Trump ends by praising Sanders for sparking a movement that “would proceed beyond the narrow realm of electoral politics to far broader and constant activism and engagement in public affairs.” That strikes me as more of an aspirational than an accurate description of the Sanders phenomenon, which by my observation is 97% electoralist so far. The sooner it goes beyond and becomes what Chomsky says it is, the better. Nothing Sanders is calling for will have a snowball’s chance in hell without massive mobilization beneath and beyond the election cycle.

 

 

 

Only Sanders Can Challenge Trump’s Predatory Budget Plan

Amid the Democratic presidential primaries and the impeachment fallout, the Trump administration released its budget proposal for 2021 Monday. Though most of it has no chance of becoming a reality, it does provide a terrifying preview of what we can expect from Trump if he wins another four years in office this November. The latest Trump budget is nothing less than a declaration of war on the poor and working-class people of America — many of whom voted for the president four years ago under the mistaken belief that he would help reverse the steady erosion of their communities after decades of neoliberal economic policies.

Over the past three years, Trump has done virtually nothing to help the so-called “forgotten men and women” of America. His latest $4.8 trillion budget would inflict tremendous pain on working families, with deep cuts on everything from student loan assistance, affordable housing, education, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid and even Social Security. Conversely, the budget calls for further increases in the bloated and wasteful military budget (plus border enforcement), and it would extend the Republican tax cuts that have so far saved corporate America and the 1% billions of dollars (thus adding trillions to the federal debt despite cuts in social spending).

The billionaire president’s budget is a class war manifesto targeting the most vulnerable Americans while providing his fellow billionaires and millionaires more tax breaks and the military industrial complex more lavish defense contracts. It is hard to exaggerate just how extreme Trump’s budget really is and how blatantly it targets the poorest families in America. The fact that working people are the most likely to be recruited into fighting the forever wars started by Washington elites who consider the poor fodder for their wars and would never send their own children (or fight themselves) simply shows how much contempt Trump and his fellow Republicans have for the majority of Americans.

In a “sane and functioning American republic,” Esquire’s Charles Pierce rightly observed, this budget would be “political suicide.” But clearly we don’t live in a “sane and functioning” republic, and the fact that Trump thinks he can release such an extreme budget during an election year shows that he is supremely confident in his political powers. With the Democrats currently battling each other for the presidential nomination, and with the anointed front-runner collapsing before our eyes, Trump seems to believe that his reelection is all but guaranteed. He may be right, of course. As John Cassidy remarked in The New Yorker, “If the Democrats can’t take advantage of this election-year horror script, they really are in trouble.”

Trump’s budget should be a gift to Democrats, but if they end up nominating someone like the ex-Republican billionaire Mike Bloomberg or the McKinsey neoliberal Pete Buttigieg as their candidate, going after Trump for waging a class war on working people will become very difficult. The obvious candidate who can authentically challenge Trump and call out his class war on working families is, of course, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic frontrunner. Sanders gave us a preview of how he would go after Trump in a statement responding to the president’s absurd budget on Monday.

“The Trump Budget for 2021 is a budget of, by, and for the 1 percent,” declared Sanders, calling the president a liar for saying that he would never cut programs like Medicare and Social Security, which are now on the cutting block. “The Trump Budget does not see a problem in this country it cannot somehow make worse. Unless, of course, the problem is that the wealthiest families and largest corporations in this country haven’t gotten enough tax cuts, or that the military-industrial complex isn’t raking in profits that are obscene enough.”

Condemning the Trump budget as an “immoral document,” the senator called it “proof that this president did not care about the ‘forgotten men and women’ he said he would help — it appears he is too busy enriching his billionaire friends.”

By contrast to Sanders’ no-holds-barred approach and powerful denunciation of neoliberal orthodoxy, his fellow Democratic contender Pete Buttigieg has recently embraced the discredited politics of austerity, suggesting that Democrats should become the new party of “fiscal responsibility” in light of the massive Republican deficits. Buttigieg’s “sudden pivot to deficit-hawk politics,” remarks Alexander Sammon in The American Prospect, “is deeply misguided and evinces a profound misunderstanding of recent political and economic history.” To nominate someone like Buttigieg — who is the youngest candidate in the race, but one of the most backward-looking — would be to let Trump off the hook. Mayor Pete, like Biden and Bloomberg, would be the perfect foil for Trump, who employs a kind cultural class politics that exploits lower-class resentment against the “winners” of globalization, i.e., the professional class (represented by candidates like Buttigieg and Bloomberg).

Discrediting and defanging Trump’s politics of cultural resentment will require a candidate like Sanders, who offers a genuine economic critique and political alternative to both Trump’s brand of reactionary neoliberalism and the “progressive neoliberalism” of his current opponents. The Democratic Party has a rare opportunity to nominate a transformative candidate who could usher in a new post-neoliberal era. To blow it on someone like Bloomberg would be a colossal mistake — one the party might never recover from.

Bloomberg Once Blamed End of ‘Redlining’ for 2008 Collapse

WASHINGTON — At the height of the 2008 economic collapse, then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the elimination of a discriminatory housing practice known as “redlining” was responsible for instigating the meltdown.

“It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone,” Bloomberg, now a Democratic presidential candidate, said at a forum that was hosted by Georgetown University in September 2008. “Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas.’”

He continued: “And then Congress got involved — local elected officials, as well — and said, ‘Oh that’s not fair, these people should be able to get credit.’ And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.”

Bloomberg, a billionaire who built a media and financial services empire before turning to electoral politics, was correct that the financial crisis was triggered in part by banks extending loans to borrowers who were ill-suited to repay them. But by attributing the meltdown to the elimination of redlining, a practice used by banks to discriminate against minority borrowers, Bloomberg appears to be blaming policies intended to bring equality to the housing market.

The term redlining comes from the “red lines” those in the financial industry would draw on a map to denote areas deemed ineligible for credit, frequently based on race.

“It’s been well documented that the 2008 crash was caused by unethical, predatory lending that deliberately targeted communities of color,” said Debra Gore-Mann, president and CEO of the Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit that works for racial and economic justice. “People of color were sold trick loans with exploding interest rates designed to push them into foreclosure. Our communities of color and low income communities were the victims of the crash, not the cause.”

Campaign spokesman Stu Loeser said that Bloomberg “attacked predatory lending” as mayor and, if elected president, has a plan to “help a million more Black families buy a house, and counteract the effects of redlining and the subprime mortgage crisis.”

The campaign also pointed to efforts by Bloomberg’s private philanthropy to help other cities craft policies that will help reduce evictions. He promised in a January speech to do a version of the very thing he criticized in 2008: Ask lenders to update their credit-scoring models, “because millions of black households don’t have a credit score which is needed to get a mortgage.”

After this story was published, Loeser added: “He’s saying that something bad – the financial crisis – followed something good, which is the fight against redlining that he was part of as Mayor.”

Bloomberg’s 2008 remarks stand in contrast with the decades-long positions some of his rivals have held.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s work as a professor and attorney has been devoted to the study of bankruptcy and the disastrous impact it has on the financial well-being of families. As a young Delaware senator, Joe Biden held hearings on unfair lending practices and sponsored legislation to ban discrimination in lending and crack down on industry figures who did.

On Thursday, Warren criticized Bloomberg for suggesting the end of redlining caused the crash.

“Out-of-control greed by Wall Street and big banks, and the corruption that lets them control our government, caused the crash,” she tweeted.

“I’m surprised that someone running for the Democratic nomination thinks the economy would be better off if we just let banks be more overtly racist,” she said. “We need to confront the shameful legacy of discrimination, not lie about it like Mike Bloomberg.”

Bloomberg’s redlining remarks are the latest instance of his past comments by him that have resurfaced in recent days that make him appear racially insensitive.

On Tuesday, an audio recording ricocheted around social media of Bloomberg defending the police department’s use of the controversial “stop-and-frisk” tactic during a 2015 appearance at the Aspen Institute.

Under the program, New York City police officers made it a routine practice to stop and search multitudes of mostly black and Hispanic men to see if they were carrying weapons.

Although he has since apologized for his support for the policy, in the recording Bloomberg said that “95%” of murders and murder victims are young male minorities and that “you can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops.” To combat crime, he said, “put a lot of cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods.”

Bloomberg’s resurfaced comments about redlining come as he’s in the midst of a two-day tour of the South that in part is focused on building relationships with black voters who are the backbone of the Democratic Party. On Thursday, he plans to launch “Mike for Black America”

Speaking to reporters in Tennessee on Wednesday, he refused to directly apologize for the 2015 comments. In response to repeated questions, he said, “I don’t think those words reflect how I led the most diverse city in the nation.”

“I apologized for the practice and the pain that it caused,” he said Wednesday. “It was five years ago. And, you know, it’s just not the way that I think, and it doesn’t reflect what I do every day.”

Introducing Bloomberg at an event in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Dr. Elenora Woods, president of the city’s NAACP chapter, said he would be a tireless fighter for economic justice for black Americans.

“Look, I know what racism looks like. I know what it looks like, and that’s not Mike Bloomberg,” she said.

___

Associated Press writers Alexandra Jaffe in Washington and Kathleen Ronayne in Chattanooga, Tennessee, contributed to this report.

Michael Bloomberg’s Stop-and-Frisk Apology Tour Is Too Little, Too Late

Five million. That’s the number of times that New York City police stopped people during the “stop and frisk” program when billionaire Michael Bloomberg was mayor. “Stop and frisk” is when police stop a person, usually force their hands against a wall, and aggressively pat them down, looking for a weapon or contraband. This week, the former mayor, now rising in the polls as a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, issued an apology for “stop and frisk,” saying that he “inherited the police practice.” But the fact is, after Bloomberg became mayor in 2002, NYPD “stop and frisks” increased by 700 percent. The vast majority targeted were black and brown youth. Statistics showed that, among all those stopped, whites proved to be twice as likely to be carrying a gun. Despite that, only 10% of those frisked were white.

The policy terrorized communities of color across New York City. Outraged citizens marched by the thousands, once converging on Bloomberg’s mansion on the upper East side. The Center for Constitutional Rights finally prevailed in a lawsuit in 2013, as Bloomberg’s third term as mayor was nearing its end. “This is an indirect form of racial profiling,” U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin wrote in her opinion. “It leads NYPD officers to stop blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white.”

Scheindlin imposed strict reforms on the NYPD with a court monitor to ensure implementation. The Bloomberg administration appealed and won a stunning legal victory: not only did the appeals court issue a stay of the ordered reforms, allowing the NYPD to continue to stop and frisk during the appeal, but, in an unusual move, the court also removed Scheindlin from the case. The Bloomberg administration was also behind attempts to impugn Scheindlin’s reputation by shopping around media stories that she had an “anti-cop” bias.

Ultimately, Bill de Blasio won his race to succeed Bloomberg, and his administration dropped the appeal. The use of stop and frisk has fallen precipitously under de Blasio, and the monitor Judge Scheindlin appointed is still overseeing the NYPD’s compliance with the court’s orders.

A year ago, Michael Bloomberg was clear that he wasn’t going to run for president. He said he couldn’t “unless I was willing to change all my views and go on what CNN called an apology tour.” Jump ahead to November, and he changed his tune. Addressing predominantly African American parishioners at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, Bloomberg said, referring to stop and frisk, “Back then, I was wrong, and I am sorry.” A week later, he announced his candidacy for president.

Bloomberg’s apologies continue. On Tuesday, he released a statement on stop and frisk that read, “as part of our effort to stop gun violence it was overused. By the time I left office, I cut it back by 95 percent, but I should’ve done it faster and sooner. I regret that and I have apologized — and I have taken responsibility for taking too long to understand the impact it had on black and Latino communities.”

Bloomberg issued his latest apology only after two damning recordings surfaced. One, from a talk he gave at the Aspen Institute in 2015, captured Bloomberg saying,

“Ninety-five percent of murders–murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16-25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city (inaudible)…Put those cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods…the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them.”

The audio was discovered by journalist Benjamin Dixon. “It was online. It was hiding in plain sight,” Dixon us on the Democracy Now! news hour. “Bloomberg’s team actually requested that the video from the Aspen Institute not be released. It had been online for five years…I felt like people needed to hear his voice say these things.”

In another clip from WOR radio in New York in 2013, Bloomberg said, “They just keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s a disportionate [sic] percentage of a particular ethnic group’…I think we disportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”

Up until his presidential campaign, Michael Bloomberg stood by his guns–the NYPD guns pointed at the heads of New York City’s communities of color. Now that he needs these very communities to vote for him across the country, he has apologized for targeting them. This is too little, too late, Mayor Bloomberg. Sorry.

Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Resigns After Caucus Chaos

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party announced his resignation Wednesday after a disastrous caucus process beset by technical glitches led to a dayslong delay in reporting the results, inconsistencies in the numbers and no clear winner.

The embarrassing episode also threatened Iowa’s cherished status as the first voting contest of the presidential primary season and led both front-runners to request a partial recanvass of the results.

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The Iowa Caucuses Are a Mortal Threat to Democracy



by Bill Boyarsky

“The fact is that Democrats deserved better than what happened on caucus night. As chair of this party, I am deeply sorry for what happened and bear the responsibility for any failures on behalf of the Iowa Democratic Party,” Chairman Troy Price wrote in a resignation letter a week and a half after Iowa’s caucuses.

“While it is my desire to stay in this role and see this process through to completion, I do believe it is time for the Iowa Democratic Party to begin looking forward, and my presence in my current role makes that more difficult.”

Price said his departure would occur as soon as the state party elects a replacement, and he called an emergency Saturday meeting to do so.

After a breakdown in tallying the results on Feb. 3, it took until Feb. 6 for the state party, which operates the series of roughly 1,700 local meetings statewide, to issue what it said are complete results.

In those figures, released by the party, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg leads Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by two state delegate equivalents out of 2,152 counted. That is a margin of 0.09 percentage points.

The Associated Press said it was unable to declare a winner, based on the available information. The results as reported by the Iowa Democratic Party, the AP believes, may not be fully accurate.

Price had called the delays in reporting results “unacceptable.” He said the party would conduct a “thorough, transparent and independent examination” of what caused the delays. He apologized for the breakdown in the process.

Both Buttigieg’s and Sanders’ campaigns requested a partial recanvass of the Iowa results, which the Iowa Democratic Party approved. The party says it expects the recanvass of more than 80 precincts to begin on Sunday and last two days. A recanvass is not a recount, but a check of the vote count against paper records created by caucus leaders to ensure the counts were reported accurately.

The party has said it will not change mistakes in the math and the only opportunity to correct it would be a recount, which would be the candidates’ next option after the recanvass is completed.

Price was elected to his second term as chairman of the state party in December 2018. In a statement released after his reelection, he noted that he was “incredibly proud” of the success that Iowa Democrats had in the 2018 midterms and looked forward to building on it.

“I cannot wait to work with them again on what could very well be one of the most consequential Iowa Caucuses of our time,” he said.

Price previously was part of several Democratic campaigns in Iowa, including those of former President Barack Obama and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Price also had served as the party’s executive director and led One Iowa, an LGBT advocacy group.

The Iowa Democratic Party instituted new rules for the 2020 contest that were meant to enhance transparency in the process.

In previous years, the Iowa Democratic Party reported just one number: the number of state delegates won by each candidate. For the first time, the party this year reported two other numbers — who had the most votes at the beginning and at the end of the night.

The additional data is a nod to Sanders and his supporters, who argued that the previous rules essentially robbed him of victory in his 2016 race against Clinton. That contest ended in a narrow delegate victory for Clinton in Iowa.

Democrats’ Shadowy Plot to Stop Bernie Sanders

Yogi Berra, the great Yankees catcher, had the memorable line, “It’s like deja vu all over again.”

Bernie Sanders supporters might have been thinking the same thing after the fiasco of the Iowa caucuses.

It was just four years ago that the corporate hacks who run the Democratic Party rigged the 2016 primary election process to favor Hillary Clinton and stop Sanders: The Democratic National Committee, which is supposed to stay neutral in a primary, secretly funneled party funds to Hillary’s campaign, fed Hillary debate questions before a CNN town hall, and selected superdelegates who pledged their votes to Hillary before the first primary votes were even cast.

This time around, Democratic Party insiders appear to be playing the same game. Throughout 2019, corporate Democrats and their media allies disparaged and minimized Bernie’s campaign, asserting that it had little chance of winning the nomination. But these tactics didn’t work. In late December, Sanders was leading in polling in Iowa, New Hampshire, and nationwide, and was close to the lead or within the margin of error in other important primary states like South Carolina, Nevada, California, and Texas.

I imagine that the forces of corporate greed feared that if Sanders could claim victory in the Iowa caucuses, he might gain momentum that would make him impossible to stop. To the rescue came a company called Shadow.

Shadow is one of these Democratic Party consulting operations stuffed with former staffers of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign. Shadow used its leverage with high-level Democratic donors to secure a contract with the Iowa Democratic Party to count the votes. And it completely bungled the job. The company tried to report results in the caucuses through an untested app slapped together in a few months. The app prevented precinct chairs from reporting the vote totals on caucus night, throwing the entire process into chaos, humiliating the Democratic Party, and demoralizing the Iowa voters who took the time to come out and caucus. It also denied Sanders the opportunity to make a victory speech, although he won the popular vote and at least tied the pledged delegate allocation.

The dark money group that launched Shadow was cofounded by Tara McGowan, a veteran of Obama’s reelection campaign, and the wife of a senior strategist with the Pete Buttigieg campaign, which paid Shadow $42,500 last July for digital services. These conflicts of interest apparently failed to raise any alarm bells at party headquarters.

Buttigieg’s investment in Shadow paid off big when Iowa officials announced partial results that allowed him to claim victory. Moreover, by paying Shadow for data services, Buttigieg signaled to the Democratic Party operatives—a loose alliance of consultants, corporate lobbyists, and pundits—that if elected, he will keep the money flowing to these bandits, despite their terminal corruption and incompetence. It’s no wonder that he’s a favorite of the party establishment and Wall Street donors. Sanders, on the other hand, is a mortal threat to this consultant class and to their business model of collecting checks for doing horrible work.

The corporate donors to the Democratic Party fear and loathe Sanders because he is not in their pockets. Unlike the so-called “centrist” Democrats, Sanders does not accept corporate contributions, and he does not do fund-raisers with high-dollar contributors. Instead he relies on a large army of small donors. This makes him incredibly dangerous to the corporate elite.

In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton pivoted the Democratic Party into partnership with Wall Street and with the same corporate donors funding the Republican Party. In effect, the Democratic Party sold its soul for corporate dollars. As a result, the Democrats have become a faux opposition party, taking on Republicans only in areas where their corporate patrons don’t have a stake, like abortion rights and gay rights. But when it comes to bank bailouts, forever wars, fossil fuel extraction, and for-profit health care, the Democrats are all in.

You don’t have to take my word for this. Numerous academic studies have confirmed that corporate interests get their way, no matter which party holds power. The comprehensive 2017 study Democracy in America? by political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens posits that “the wishes of ordinary Americans [have] little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.”

To cite just one recent example, last February, ExxonMobil announced the discovery of a gas field off the coast of Cyprus that’s one of the largest found in recent years. This December, members of Congress came together quietly, without hearings or debate, to provide military assistance in the development of this gas field. The winner, of course, is corporate America. ExxonMobil profits from the gas extraction, and a private company called General Atomics benefits from the drone fleet that will be maintained in the region to protect the operation. The losers, as always, are the American people, who will pay for all the military operations while all the profits from the drilling go to private corporations—a blatant form of corporate welfare. The other big loser is the environment. Tapping into another gas field will speed the destruction of the planet. Plus, offshore gas drilling produces methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide when emitted.

Sanders is a threat to this bipartisan business-as-usual model of corporate profits over the needs of ordinary Americans. If elected, Sanders has pledged to pursue policies that benefit people over corporations, like free college, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal.

The forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex seem prepared to stop Sanders at all costs. As Biden fades from contention, they are putting their money on Mayor Pete. If he stumbles, the party is prepared to install Michael Bloomberg at a brokered convention. Bloomberg, the world’s eighth richest man, has $61.9 billion at his disposal to influence the Democratic Party. The DNC has already changed its rules to allow Bloomberg to qualify for the debates. That, coupled with the Iowa caucus fiasco, has fueled calls for the resignation of DNC head Tom Perez.

The Democratic Party’s embrace of Bloomberg puts the lie to the excuse that Sanders should not be nominated because he is not sufficiently loyal to the Democratic Party. Until just recently, Bloomberg was a Republican. In 2004, Bloomberg endorsed George W. Bush, praising his decision to invade Iraq.

The chaos of recent weeks might give Sanders supporters their most potent argument yet. The Democratic Party has become so corrupt and dysfunctional that it can’t even perform the most basic function of a democracy: counting the votes. It is time to turn to new leadership. Or we can stick with the corporate Democrats and blame the Russians again when we lose to Trump.

This article was first published on the Chicago Reader and is distributed in partnership with the Independent Media Institute.

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the newly independent Reader.

Newspaper Publisher McClatchy Files for Bankruptcy Protection

The publisher of the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and dozens of other newspapers across the country has filed for bankruptcy protection.

The newspaper industry has been devastated by changing technology that has sent the vast majority of people online in search of news. While McClatchy and others have pushed digital operations aggressively, advertising dollars have continued to flow toward internet giants like Facebook and Google.

McClatchy Co.’s 30 newsrooms, including The Charlotte Observer, The News & Observer in Raleigh, and The Star-Telegram in Fort Worth, will continue to operate as usual as the publisher reorganizes under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The publisher’s origins date to 1857 when it first began publishing a four-page paper in Sacramento, California, following the California Gold Rush. That paper became The Sacramento Bee.

McClatchy has received $50 million in financing from Encina Business Credit that will enable it to maintain current operations for the company, which is still based in Sacramento.

“When local media suffers in the face of industry challenges, communities suffer: polarization grows, civic connections fray and borrowing costs rise for local governments,” said CEO Craig Forman. “We are moving with speed and focus to benefit all our stakeholders and our communities.”

McClatchy expects fourth-quarter revenues of $183.9 million, down 14% from a year earlier. Its 2019 revenue is anticipated to be down 12.1% from the previous year. That would mean that the publisher’s revenue will have slid for six consecutive years.

The company expects to pull its listing from the New York Stock Exchange as a publicly traded company, and go private.

McClatchy filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Its restructuring plan needs approval from its secured lenders, bondholders and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.

McClatchy has suffered as readers give up traditional subscriptions and get news online and like other publishers, it’s tried to follow them there.

Digital-only subscriptions have increased by almost 50% year over year, McClatchy said. The company has more than 200,000 digital-only subscribers and over 500,000 paid digital customer relationships.

Yet the migration to digital publications has not offset the loss of advertisers that once relied on newspapers.

The estimated total U.S. daily newspaper circulation including both print and digital in 2018 fell 8% from the prior year to 28.6 million for weekday. Sunday circulation fell 9% to 30.8 million, according to the Pew Research Center for Journalism and Media.

Last year, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet bleakly predicted the demise of “most local newspapers in America” within five years, except for ones bought by billionaires. The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, both national publications, are thriving after being bought by billionaires. The Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Las Vegas Review-Journal are among other major American newspapers that appear to have steadied themselves after being sold to local wealthy individuals.

Even the arrival of moneyed interests can prove fleeting.

Two weeks ago, billionaire Warren Buffett said he was selling all of Berkshire Hathaway’s publications; 31 daily newspapers in 10 states as well as 49 paid weekly publications with digital sites. Buffett is a lifelong booster of newspapers but he has said for several years that he expects most of them to continue on their declining trajectory, save for a handful of national papers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

“McClatchy remains a strong operating company with an enduring commitment to independent journalism that spans five generations of my family,” said Chairman Kevin McClatchy, the great-great grandson of the company founder, James McClatchy.

The company has also worked on its financials, trimming operating expenses by $186.9 million for the three-year period ended in December. It’s also paid off about $153.5 million in debt in the same period.

Forman said McClatchy doesn’t anticipate any adverse impact on qualified pension benefits for substantially all of the plan’s participants and beneficiaries.

_____

Josh Funk contributed to this report from Omaha, Nebraska.

Matt Taibbi: Democrats Are Unwittingly Handing Sanders the Nomination

With both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary behind us, one thing is abundantly clear: the establishment still cannot stomach a Bernie Sanders nomination. Writing in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi points out how corporate media fell all over itself on Wednesday to undercut the Vermont senator’s win in New Hampshire, just as it fabricated Pete Buttigieg’s victory in Iowa just a week ago.

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What’s Driving Democrats’ ‘Bernie-or-Bust’ Freakout



by Jacob Bacharach

Establishment Democrats are throwing everything—and everyone–they’ve got into the primary race to stop or at least slow the Vermont senator’s ascendance. Ironically, it is precisely this eagerness to nominate anybody but Sanders that is leading Democrats into the same trap Republicans fell into in 2016. From Taibbi’s latest column:

Four years ago, after New Hampshire, it was crystal clear that Donald Trump was not only going to win his party’s nomination, but that his path was being actively cleared by the Republican Party establishment and the national news media, whose half-baked efforts to stop him were working in reverse. I wrote this in February 2016:

The [Republicans] sent forth to take on Trump have been so incompetent, they can’t even lose properly. One GOP strategist put it this way: “Maybe 34 [percent] is Trump’s ceiling. But 34 in a five-person race wins…” The numbers simply don’t work, unless the field unexpectedly narrows before March. 

Early mixed results guaranteed that Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio would not drop out soon enough to give any of the others a chance. As a result, the following was obvious at this time four years ago: “Trump will probably enjoy at least a five-horse race through Super Tuesday.”

In hindsight, those Republican challengers were so villainously terrible that none would have beaten Trump in a two-person race. Still, Bush’s backers knew their man was roadkill by New Hampshire, yet didn’t pull the plug. Kasich, who in a rare moment of self-awareness was ready to bail after Iowa (“If we get smoked up there, I’m going back to Ohio,” he fumed in New Hampshire), let himself be fooled by one surprise second-place finish.

All pledged to be committed to stopping Trump but accelerated his victory by staying in too long. Popular disgust was also enhanced by delusional news-media hype surrounding a succession of would-be “real” candidates.

All of this is happening all over again, only this time it’s Democrats who are committing ritualistic self-abuse, seemingly in a conspiracy with one another and the news media to push as many votes as possible to a hated outsider.

The journalist goes on to list the many ways Republicans paved the path for Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee four years ago, comparing how the media gushed over Pete Buttigieg to the rapturous reporting of Marco Rubio’s short-lived “Marcomentum” after Iowa. These outlets are even regurgitating the same awful puns. (“Petementum”? “Klomentum”? Who comes up with these?)

“These constant mercurial shifts in ‘momentum’ — it’s Pete! It’s Amy! Paging Mike Bloomberg!,” writes Taibbi, “have eroded the kingmaking power of the Democratic leadership. They are eating the party from within, and seem poised to continue doing so.”

Taibbi admits that “no one could have predicted that even the idiosyncratic particulars of the 2016 and 2020 races would be so alike.” But unlike the electoral nightmare of 2016, this particular horse race won’t end with the “horrifying” nomination of a neo-nazi sympathizer. And if Sanders becomes the Democratic nominee and bests Trump—as most polls predict he will—the U.S. will have elected a democratic socialist who can deliver “a future to believe in,” as Sanders’ campaign slogan goes.

As for the Berniecrats, Taibbi advises them to simply keep asking themselves, “Are you bought off, or not?” and hang tight while their man crosses the finish line, much to the dismay of an increasingly inept establishment.